Fatally attractive in
his gloom, alienation, “Weltschmertz und Skeptizismus”,[2] he leads at once to the heroes of Pushkin’s Eastern Tales, later to
Pushkin’s satirically-rendered Evgeny Onegin, to the Superfluous Man of
nineteenth-century Russian fiction, and to other variants. He leads to
Lermontov’s Pechorin, to Musset’s Rolla, and later still to Huysmans’ Des
Esseintes – another comic version of him.

The comic versions owe
little or nothing to Byron’s own well-attested capacity for self-mockery, of
which I shall speak later. The “Byronic” original is not funny, and the “Byronic”
myth allows no room for the real Byron’s sense of humour.

This “Byronic” Hero is
seen at his most extreme in such figures as Baudelaire’s Prince, of whom the
poet laments that he is:

Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant
très-vieux,

Qui,
de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes,

S’ennuie
avec ses chiens comme avec d’autres bêtes.

Rien
ne peut l’égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon,

Ni
son peuple mourant en face du balcon.

[“… rich, but powerless, young, yet very old, who, despising the
kow-tows of his advisers, is bored by his dogs, as by other beasts. Nothing can
cheer him, neither sport, nor falcon, nor his subjects dying before his
balcony”.]

The Byronic Hero exists
either to be shunned by his fellows, or to be loved hopelessly by a good woman,
or to be shot. The lesser literature of the nineteenth-century is strewn with
brigands, pirates, alienated intellectuals, disillusioned politicians, and
suicidal poets, all deriving from the early heroes of Byron – just as the
literary history of the century is strewn with the corpses of writers –
Pushkin, Lermontov, Espronceda, Musset – who died early, under the impression that
they were imitating him.

First- and
second-generation Byronism was a misanthropic, nihilistic cul-de-sac. The Russians
were completely taken in by it, and loved it. Dostoevsky took it very
seriously, and wrote of it:

First of all, one
shouldn’t use the word ‘Byronist’ as an insult. Byronism, though a momentary
phenomenon, was a great, sacred and necessary one in the life of European mankind
and, perhaps, in that of the entire human race. Byronism appeared at a moment
of dreadful anguish and disillusionment among men. After the ecstatic
transports at the new ideals proclaimed at the end of the previous century in
France, then the most progressive nation of European mankind, the outcome was
very different from what had been expected; this so deceived the faith of man,
that there has never perhaps been a sadder moment in the history of Western
Europe. The new idols – raised for one moment only – fell not only as a result
of political causes, but because of their innate bankruptcy – which was clearly
perceived by the wise hearts and progressive minds. The new outcome was not yet in sight; the new
valve was not yet opened, and everybody was suffocating under the weight of a
former world, which drew itself down over mankind in a most dreadful manner.
The old idols lay shattered.

At this very moment a
great and mighty genius, a passionate poet, appeared. In his melodies there
sounded all the anguish mankind felt in those days, its gloomy disillusionment
in its mission, and in the ideals which had deceived it. It was a novel,
hitherto unheard-of muse, of vengeance and sorrow, cursing and despair. The
spirit of Byronism swept mankind as a whole, and everything responded to it. It
was precisely as if a valve had been opened: amidst the universal and dull
groans – mostly inarticulate – this was a mighty outcry, in which all the cries
of mankind combined in one chord. How could it not have been felt in Russia,
and particularly by so great, ingenious and pioneering a mind as that of
Pushkin? – So in those days, no strong mind in Russia, no magnanimous heart, could
have avoided Byronism. And not only because of distant compassion for Europe
and European mankind, but because precisely at that time in Russia, too, there
arose a great many unsolved and tormenting questions, a great many old
disillusionments …[3]

The “new outcome”
(“новый исход”)to
which the slavophile Dostoevsky would have us believe Byronism blinded Europe
temporarily, is, he tells us a few lines later,
“преклонение
перед правдой
народа
русского” – “the worship of the
truth of the Russian people”. Now, we have to admit with the hindsight of 2007
that, much as we love the Russian people, the “truth” they embodied or embody
has not been of much benefit to anyone, least of all to them: perhaps if Dostoevsky
had foreseen the story of Russia in the twentieth century he would have seen
Byronism in a still more favourable light.

Variants of the
Byronic hero appear in the nineteenth-century English novel, often as a seducer:
George Staunton in The Heart of Midlothian, Steerforth in David
Copperfield. Not until the twentieth century did the four great English-language
modernists, Eliot, Yeats, Pound, and, especially, Joyce, find (in their very
different idioms), more to derive from Byron than just sex and alienation.

Byron would have been
intrigued by this final outcome (imagine him reading the Cantos for the first
time), but very amused and / or frustrated indeed by the interim development.
For the Byronic Hero and the tales from which he derived – “my Harrys and Larrys,
Pilgrims and Pirates”, as he described them[4]
– constituted a dead-end in his own work: a dead end which, however, received
maximum publicity, thanks to its novelty (for, though largely literary in
inspiration, it was imagined to be autobiographical), and thanks to the speed
with which, via post-Waterloo French prose translations, it was disseminated
throughout Europe. But the poems upon which it was based were written
carelessly, at high speed. Byron became ashamed of having pandered to what he
saw, even as he wrote, as the debased taste of a public with no literary
standards:

They [modern poets] have raised a Mosque by the side of a
Grecian temple of the purest Architecture [the legacy of Pope] – and
more barbarous than the Barbarians from whose practise I have borrowed the
figure – they are not contented with their own grotesque edifice – unless they
destroy the prior and beautiful fabric which preceded and shames them &
their forever and ever. – – I shall be told that amongst these – I have
been – (or it may be still am) conspicuous; – true – and I am ashamed of
it; – I have been among the builders of this Babel attended by a
confusion of tongues – but never amongst the envious destroyers of the classic
temple of our Predecessor. I have loved and honoured the fame and name of that
illustrious and unrivalled man – far more than my own paltry renown.[5]

When Byron found his
real forte as a writer – in 1817, with Beppo – the earlier “Byron” had
taken too strong a hold on the imagination of the world to be shaken off.
Byron’s own inability to relinquish the idiom completely, as, for example, in
the figure of Fletcher Christian in The Island, a poem written for a
readership to whose low appetite Byron was pandering, did not help.

We could discuss
endlessly who was to blame for “Byronism” and “the Byronic hero”: ultimately,
however, it was Byron himself.

——————————

When we look at what Byron inherited via his haphazard but capacious
reading from the European tradition, we find that the ingredients which make “Byronism”
and “the Byronic Hero” make up only a small fragment of it. Two of his
favourite writers were the eighteenth-century rationalists Voltaire and Pierre
Bayle, without whose voluminous complete works he felt almost unable to travel.[6]
In them he would have found much material for the scepticism which marks his
poems and plays about religion (not a subject about which the Byronic Hero,
irreligious though he may appear, thinks rationally at all). The
following thought from Bayle’s Dictionary, about God the Father, goes straight
into Cain:

This is to compare the Deity to a Father who should suffer his
Children to break their legs on purpose to show his City his great Art in
setting their Broken Bones; or to a King who should suffer Seditions and
Factions to encrease thro’ all his Kingdom, that he might purchase the Glory of
quelling them. The Conduct of this Father and Monarch is so contrary to the
clear and distinct ideas, according to which we judge of Goodness and Wisdom,
and in general of the whole Duty of a Father and a King, that our Reason cannot
conceive how God can make use of the same.[7]

Eighteenth-century scepticism was only one thread of Byron’s
reading. While writing the Turkish Tales, from which “Byronism” sprang, he made
a thorough study of the Italian epic verse tradition. Between 1813 and 1816[8]
he bought two complete copies of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso,[9]
three copies of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata,[10]
plus at least two copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy,[11]
and assisted himself by learning Italian systematically.[12]
He also bought Black’s Life of Tasso,[13]
a thirteen-volume Machiavelli,[14]
and Goldoni’s Memoirs.[15]
To get it all in perspective he bought an 1813 edition of Sismondi’s de la
Littérature du Midi.[16]
Much of this research and reading gets into Don Juan. Thus,
simultaneously with sowing the seeds of “Byronism” via The Corsair, Lara,
and so on, he was preparing himself for “Byronism’s” antidote. The Siege Cantos
of Don Juan – in which a Christian army besieges and sacks an Islamic
town – have as models similar sieges and sacks in the Morgante Maggiore,
the Orlando Furioso, and the Gerusalemme Liberata. When Ariosto
recounts the aftermath of a successful siege, in which a Christian army
captures the Islamic city of Bizerta in North Africa, he lets slip, in his honesty, some details
at which Byron would have nodded grimly:

[Such was the violence of the
impetuous host as it surged through the gaps in the walls into the city to
destroy the ill-captained Saracens with fire and sword. Murder, robbery and
violence done to life and property hastened the downfall of the rich,
triumphant city which had once been queen of all Africa.]

When Byron has a siege in
Don Juan, he chooses, from the many
that had occurred in the years since he’d been born, a horrible but not very
famous one from the Turkish Wars of Catherine the Great. Surely he did so
because it was one of the few modern examples of a Christian army besieging a
Moslem town, as in Ariosto:

These and other important
themes in Byron’s work form no part of nineteenth-century “Byronism”. What
Byron expressed in his best poetry is the opposite of what his immediate
readership, and the readership of the nineteenth century, claimed it had
discovered. This readership perceived Don Juan as a regrettable
aberration.

——————————

To examine further what Byron valued most in his reading, I want to
examine, not his poems and plays, nor his library sales catalogues, but the
commonest quotations and references in his letters. Here, in his private
communications, we surely find which books meant most to him, even though in
his literary output we may not find many traces of them. The question I wish to
ask is, with which characters from fiction did he most empathise? Where did he
find the figures which reminded him most of himself?

I find three books being
referred to over and over again by Byron in his letters: they are Shakespeare’s
Henry IV part I, Sheridan’s
The Critic, and the novel Gil Blas, by Alain René le Sage.

At Don Juan I, 125,
Byron writes,

Sweet
is a legacy, and passing sweet

The
unexpected death of some old Lady

Or
Gentleman of seventy years complete,

Who’ve
made “us youth” wait too – too long already

For
a estate, or cash, or country-seat …

It’s a reference to
his mother-in-law, Lady Noel, from whose death he expects to benefit (she was
still alive when Don Juan I was published). The two-word phrase “us youth” is Byron’s favourite Shakespearean
quotation; it occurs more often in his letters than any other,[19]
and is part of Falstaff’s cry (They hate
us youth!) as he ambushes the travellers on Gad’s Hill, at Henry IV i II ii 85. The irony is (i)
against Falstaff, who is no youth, and (ii) against Byron, who is no youth
either: losing his youth was a fate which he did not anticipate with pleasure,
and, like Falstaff, he joked about it to cover his gloom:

A doomed, Byronic
version of Falstaff can be sensed subtextually beneath much of Don Juan.
Byron often identifies with the heroic, tragic figures of Macbeth and
Coriolanus; but it’s the comic, overweight, almost-over-the-hill Sir John
Falstaff who, from the Shakespearean gallery, means most to him in terms of his
private self-image.

Falstaff is of course
famous for being fraudulent through and through (it’s because he’s so openly
mendacious and fake that we love him so much). A more neurotically fraudulent
character is the fifth-rate playwright Sir Fretful Plagiary in Act I of The
Critic, by Byron’s drunken friend Sheridan. Where Falstaff revels openly in
his mendacity, Sir Fretful pretends all the time to be sincere. He demands
honest criticism of his plays, but when he gets it he can’t accept it, and ascribes
it to bad motives:

Sir Fretful: I say nothing – I take away from no man’s merit – am hurt
at no man’s good fortune – I say nothing. – But this I will say – through all
my knowledge of life, I have observed – that there is not a passion so strongly
rooted in the human heart as envy![21]

His two-facedness
invites ridicule, which he receives in abundance – and from those who claim to
be his friends. By the end of the scene, he has been goaded into a kind of self-realisation:

Dangle: A severe rogue! ha! ha! ha! But you are quite right, Sir Fretful, never to

read such nonsense.

Sir Fretful: To be sure – for if there is anything to one’s praise,
it is a foolish

vanity to be gratified at
it; and, if it is abuse – why one is always sure to hear

of it from one damned
good-natured friend or other!

… let me tell you, if you continue to believe this, you must mean to
insult me, gentlemen – and, then, your disrespect will affect me no more than
the newspaper criticisms – and I shall treat it with exactly the same calm
indifference and philosophic contempt – and so your servant. (Exit.)[22]

This sad character
seems to have got under Byron’s skin like few others. He is always quoting him
in letters. On May 5th 1810
he writes: “My friend H. is naturally anxious on the head of his rhymes … but
he has not yet acquired the ‘calm indifference’ (as Sir Fretful has it), of us
old Authors”.[23] On June 12th 1813, he writes
about a book called “Strictures on Lord Byron”: “I may enjoy it like Sir
Fretful or the Archbishop of Granada”.[24]
On August 22nd 1813,
he quotes Sir Fretful again: “Mr Jeffrey (or his deputy) ‘has done the handsome
thing by me,’ and I say nothing. But this I will say …”[25]
On September 18th 1815 he writes, “one thing you may be sure of – if there is
any thing bad you will always as Sheridan says ‘find some damned good natured
friend or other to tell it you’”.[26]
Faced with criticism, it pleases him to take Sir Fretful as his model of
deportment.

“The Archbishop of Granada”,
whom Byron associates with Sir Fretful, is from le Sage’s picaresque novel Gil
Blas(1715-35). One episode from this book made such an impact on Byron that he
returns to it nine times in his correspondence.[27]
In the seventh book, Gil Blas becomes secretary to the Archbishop of Granada,
who is struck by his fine taste in letters. The Archbishop is old, and commands
that, when his sermons begin to lose their quality, Gil, whose frankness he
values, should tell him so at once. The time comes when, after an apoplexy,
it’s clear that his touch has gone, and Gil tells him so: but the Archbishop’s
reaction is not a humble one:

“I were unfit to live in a Christian land!” interrupted he, with
stammering impatience; “I were unfit to live in a Christian land if I liked you
the less for such a Christian virtue as sincerity. A man who does not love
sincerity sets his face against the distinguishing mark between a friend and a
flatterer. I should have given you infinite credit for speaking what you
thought, if you had thought anything that deserved to be spoken. I have been
finely taken in by your outside shew of cleverness, without any solid
foundation of sober judgment!”

Though completely
unhorsed, and at the enemy’s mercy, I wanted to make terms of decent capitulation,
and to go unmolested into winter quarters: but let those who think to appease
an exasperated author, and especially an author whose ear has been long attuned
to the music of his own praises, take warning by my fate. “Let us talk no more
on the subject, my very young friend,” said he. “You are as yet scarcely in the
rudiments of good taste, and utterly incompetent to distinguish between gold
and tinsel. You are yet to learn that I never in all my life composed a finer
homily than that unfortunate one which had not the honour of your approbation.
The immortal part of me, by the blessing of heaven on me and my congregation,
is less weighed down by human infirmity than when the flesh was stronger. We
all grow wiser as we grow older, and I shall in future select the people about
me with more caution; nor submit the castigation of my works but to a much
abler critic than yourself. Get about your business!” pursued he, giving me an
angry shove by the shoulders out of his closet; “go and tell my treasurer to pay
you a hundred ducats, and take my priestly blessing in addition to that sum.
God speed you, good Master Gil Blas! I heartily pray that you may do well in
the world! There is nothing to stand in your way, but the want of a little
better taste.”[28]

On each occasion in his
letters, Byron takes on the role either of the Archbishop, or of Sir Fretful: that
is, of one who needs criticism, asks for it, but is unable to take it when it
comes.

Sir John Falstaff, Sir
Fretful Plagiary, and the Archbishop of Granada.
These characters do not at first seem at all like Conrad, Lara, or Childe
Harold – still less like Evgeny Onegin, or Pechorin, A Hero of Our Time. But
are they really so unlike? I believe not. They all have one dreadful problem in
common: all exist beyond the pale of human discourse, and have to be rejected.
Falstaff, the consummate liar, believes in a fantasy-future in which he will
become the most powerful man in the country: his disillusion kills him. Sir
Fretful leaves the stage in humiliation at the end of Act I, and has no further
part in the pageant. Obviously the Archbishop remains in his pulpit; but we can
see he has no future there – perhaps another apoplexy will carry him off in
mid-sermon. That Byron should – in the spontaneity of his private letters –
identify himself with such men, shows a sense of humour, a humility, an
acknowledgement of his common fallibility and humanity, which is absent from
the supposed self-depictions in his “Byronic” verse.

It has a worrying
undercurrent, however, in line with the self-deprecation we find here:

Once he left England,
though fame pursued him, a “rambling”, “tumbling”, “nameless” “broken Dandy” was
what, in effect, he became. He was as alienated from his social context as
Falstaff, Sir Fretful, and the Archbishop were in their idioms – or as Lara,
Harold, or the Giaour were in theirs. The only difference was that – unlike the
paranoid Sir Fretful or the hypersensitive Archbishop – he really did care
“[n]ought for Critics’ cavils”. Had he done so, Don Juan would have
stopped at the second canto; and Don Juan drove an even greater wedge
between himself and his old friends in England.

Only in his death,
here in Missolonghi, did he attain – perhaps – a measure of oneness with the
world.